Eric Deeran spent $4 million on Meta ads across 828 client accounts and found the platform works when you set it up right. Three things matter: qualify leads in the form itself to stop junk data, write ads with specific outcomes instead of vague features, and pre-screen for budget. Feed only clean leads back to the pixel so the algorithm learns to find better prospects.
If you're a video creative agency owner who said ads don't work for you and you've tried them in the past, I'm gonna explain exactly why they didn't work for you. Now, if they didn't work, it's simply because you didn't set them up correctly. And the reason I'm qualified to talk about this is I've spent over $4 million on Meta ads just for my businesses, and I've spent millions more for 828 client accounts that we've worked with. At the end of the day, ads is literally just putting content in front of your ideal market. And so if it didn't work, you didn't have one of these 3 things I'm gonna go through in this video. So make sure to stay till the end. If you ran ads in the past, you probably got broke leads, people who never answered the phone, and tire kickers. And then you said to yourself, ads don't work. But the problem is, is that ads weren't the problem. You just didn't have these things set up correctly. So here's exactly what you were missing. Number 1, you didn't have conditional formatting, meaning that the answers you had in your lead form didn't disqualify or DQ people who are not a good fit to work with you. Instead, you let everybody go through your form, which is a huge problem we're gonna talk about in the next slide. And because you didn't conditionally DQ people out of your funnel, you got terrible quality and Facebook went and found you more terrible leads. So what you need to do is based on the answers to each question, you need to either qualify or disqualify a lead as they go through your funnel. And it's very important what these questions are to make sure that you're properly qualifying and not overqualifying leads, because that can also lead to higher lead costs as well. Number 2, you probably didn't have the correct avatar or outcome clarity in the creative that you were running. 99% of the content and creative and ads that I see agencies run are very feature-focused. They're focused on, hey, if you're a business who needs content, which is extremely vague and not clear in any way. Instead, you wanna say something like medical companies doing over 100 make $100K a year who want more patients but don't want to keep relying on word of mouth. This is extremely specific because the way that Meta targets your ideal avatar is based on the actual copy and creative and script in your ad. A lot of people don't know this, but Meta actually reads and transcribes your video ads and then uses what words you say in the ad to go and target more people exactly like that. And so if you have watered-down messaging like businesses who need more content, it's not going to find you the correct people because you yourself are not clear on who you want to come through the the ad. And then number 3, you don't have any sort of financial qualification on the lead form or prior to your call process, meaning you're not pre-framing the budget prior to the call or in the lead form, because none of this matters if they don't have the money or budget to pay you to work with you in your agency. Then you're just left wasting your time with tire kicker leads, people who don't have the money, and people who are never going to buy in the first place, which is extremely frustrating. And finally, a bonus tip: you only want to send back clean data back to the pixel. The pixel is how your ad determines who comes through your lead form. And so if you're sending, like we said, all of this data back to the pixel, your ad account is going to more broke leads, and you're going to continue to pay for this horrible lead quality. Instead, you need to filter these people out so they never make it back to your pixel. Because if you let anyone through your lead form, like we said, it will continue to optimize for junk leads. This is probably one of the most important things people do not do, and it leads to them wasting tons of money on ads for unqualified leads. And here's an example of how that works. Let's say you have junk leads up here and good leads down here. If you have both of them trying to come into your lead form, You should only allow the qualified people to hit the pixel and then go to find more qualified people. Your ad needs to DQ people who are not good so they never make it through the form. And these are all the reasons as to why ads haven't worked for you in the past, because you've probably blamed the targeting, which doesn't matter anymore, or said ads don't work for my market, which is not true because every single business is on Instagram and Facebook. You probably tried to play around with the campaign structure to see if that would get you better results, but it didn't. Or maybe you came to the realization and said, hey, ads are just more expensive now and I'm just going to have to pay way more than I should. All of these things are false and not true because this is what it should look like when your ads bring in the right leads. If you have an audience here and there's a mix of good and bad leads in this audience, when qualified leads come through your ad, it sends that data back to the pixel, which tells the pixel to only go find more qualified leads, which allows your ads to sort through the junk leads and not target them anymore. This is how you get a cheaper qualified lead cost. But also remember, the cost per call only matters if they're qualified. So many people get really cheap leads, but they're all junk. None of that matters because those people aren't going to pay the business money or become a client. And finally, when you set up ads this way, you get cheaper leads, more qualified leads, a higher close rate, a higher show rate, a higher revenue per call, because your revenue per call goes up because you're only talking to qualified people. And you get this positive feedback loop where you get qualified leads, more qualified leads, and it continues to compound on top of each other, reducing your cost per qualified lead and getting you better leads in the process. Now, if you want our help doing this in your video or creative agency, click the link below. There's a short video to watch on the next page. You can apply to work with us there, and I hope this helps.
